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1 Marlowe's Amplification of Musaeus in Hero and Leander Bruce Brandt South Dakota State University [email protected] M

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1 Marlowe's Amplification of Musaeus in Hero and Leander Bruce Brandt South Dakota State University Bruce.Brandt@Sdstate.Edu M Marlowe’s Amplification of Musaeus in Hero and Leander Bruce Brandt South Dakota State University [email protected] Musaeus’s Hero and Leander, as Gordon Braden has shown, is ‘indisputably the principal and direct source’ of Marlowe’s poem, and as T. W. Baldwin has demonstrated, Marlowe read Musaeus in Greek, very likely using the edition that he had studied in grammar school.1 Braden concludes that the only ancillary sources of any importance are Ovidian: ‘the Heroides, apparently in Tuberville’s translation, and the Amores, in Marlowe’s own translation’.2 Suggestions have been made concerning Marlowe’s possible debts to other sixteenth-century adaptations of Hero and Leander, and surely Marlowe must have been aware of at least some of these works. However, Braden’s examination of these other adaptations reveals no compelling parallels that cannot ‘be explained without trouble in terms of general Renaissance narrative practice’.3 This article explores the way in which Marlowe’s amplification of details of plot and language from the Hero and Leander of Musaeus transforms his own Hero and Leander into a poem which is funnier, psychologically richer, and attuned to a much different vision 1 Gordon Braden, The Classics and English Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 125; and T. W. Baldwin, ‘Marlowe’s Musaeus’, Journal of Germanic and English Philology, 54 (1955), 478–85. 2 Braden, p. 125. 3 Braden, p. 125. Warren Boutcher affirms the value of Braden’s discussion, but protests that ‘the search for demonstrable textual sources’ can too quickly eliminate consideration of the interrelation of the European vernacular versions and their meaning for sixteenth-century readers: ‘“Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid?”: Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism’, Comparative Literature, 52 (2000), 11–52 (pp. 19–20). 1 of the human condition than was its source.4 It will be seen that these amplifications of Musaeus cluster particularly around the role played by the narrator, the possibility of choice in love, the appearance and beauty of Hero and Leander, their sexual immaturity and Hero’s seduction, and the consummation of their affair. The study concludes with the suggestion that looking closely at Marlowe’s use of this rhetorical strategy offers a resolution of the long-standing debate over whether or not Hero and Leander is a fragment or a finished poem Marlowe points directly to his primary source early in Hero and Leander, when he reminds the reader that Leander’s tragedy had been sung by the divine Musaeus (52). Such a direct reference not only identifies his source, but it invites comparison. Marlowe, in effect, asks the reader to weigh his achievement vis-à-vis his predecessor’s achievement, and, as Roma Gill observes, from the moment when Marlowe first turns to the description of Hero, he ‘almost seems to enter into competition with the Greek writer’.5 In William P. Weaver’s analysis, the very placement of the reference to Musaeus between two of Marlowe’s long embellishments, is designed ‘to draw attention to the greater abundance of Marlowe’s imitation — its copia, or fullness of discourse’.6 Robert Logan similarly concludes that Marlowe intends the comparison to reveal ‘how much richer Marlowe’s poem is, not only in its greater thematic import but in its more sophisticated artistry’.7 With 818 lines, Marlowe’s poem is significantly longer than the 343 lines of Musaeus’s Hero and Leander. Moreover, Marlowe’s epyllion actually builds upon only 268 of Musaeus’s lines, ignoring the opening 15-line invocation of the muse and making little use of the 70 lines that follow the lovers’ first night together. The greater length of Marlowe’s poem derives in part from his own creative mythopoesis: he incorporates into the narrative an etiological myth purporting to explain academic poverty as well as the story of the naive Leander’s encounter with the enamored Neptune. However, an important part of the greater length of Marlowe’s poem reflects his use of amplification. Indeed, as Rosamund Tuve concludes in her discussion of Marlowe’s imagery, ‘most of his description turns out to be 4 Citations of Marlowe are from Roma Gill’s old-spelling edition, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 5 vols, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), I. Musaeus is cited in English from the Loeb edition (Greek Authors 421): Callimachus, Aetia, Iambi, Lyric Poems, Hecale, Minor Epic and Elegiac Poems, and Other Fragments, ed. and trans. by C. A. Trypanis, and Musaeus, Hero and Leander, ed. by Thomas Gelzer, trans. by Cedric Whitman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). 5 Gill, I, p. 179. 6 William P. Weaver, ‘Marlowe’s Fable: Hero and Leander and the Rudiments of Eloquence’, Studies in Philology, 105 (2008), 388–408 (p. 389). 7 Robert A. Logan, ‘Perspective in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander: Engaging our Detachment’, in ‘A Poet and a filthy Play-maker’: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama (New York: AMS Press, 1988), pp. 279–91 (p. 284). 2 amplification’.8 Weaver urges that recent scholarly concern with the history of the book ‘presents a critical opportunity to revisit and refine theoretical studies of imitation’.9 Doing so, he argues, reveals Marlowe’s deep interest ‘in the types of eloquence practiced in the Elizabethan grammar schools’.10 He finds that Marlowe’s adaptation of Musaeus ‘demonstrates the same strategy found in the mock-heroic amplification of a fable; he uses two formal elements for amplification: description and declamation’.11 Weaver also discerns that ‘The sophistical speeches of Leander are an important part of Marlowe’s amplification of Musaeus’.12 The details that Marlowe seizes upon to make his own are often very small, calling little attention to themselves in their original context. The first moment considered here is one in which Marlowe’s amplification also draws upon Turberville’s translation of the Heroides. When Museaus’s Hero tells Leander that she lives in a high tower by the sea, she refers to ‘making my home with a single maid-servant’ (188). We know nothing else about this servant. Marlowe brings her to life. His Hero reveals that A dwarfish beldame beares me companie, That hops about the chamber where I lie, And spends the night (that might be better spent) In vaine discourse, and apish merriment. (353–56) ‘Beldame’ is used in Turberville’s translation of the Heroides, and from their gossiping together, Gill observes that Hero’s relationship to the nutrix of the nineteenth Heroides is akin to that of Juliet and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.13 However, in Ovid the conversation with her nurse that Hero describes in her letter to Leander occurs after her relationship with Leander has been established. The letter describes her longing as she waits for Leander to come to her. Her old nurse has kept her company far into the night, but, far from chattering with ‘vaine discourse’, the poor women can barely stay awake. Marlowe places Hero’s complaint about her servant in the same spot in the poem where the bare reference to a servant appears in Musaeus, the moment when she tells Leander where 8 Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), p. 273. 9 Weaver, p. 390. 10 Weaver, p. 408. 11 Weaver, p. 398. 12 Weaver, p. 401. 13 Gill, I, pp. 298–99, n. 353. 3 she lives and invites him to ‘come thither’ (358). Thus, while Ovid may be the source of a nocturnal discourse between Hero and her nurse, the beldame’s comically deformed appearance, her hopping, and her apish tricks are Marlowe’s own invention. Moreover, instead of indicating the tired nurse’s patience in listening to the love-stricken Hero, Marlowe’s version indicates Hero’s impatience with her servant’s very presence. His portrait reflects the feelings of a newly love-stricken young woman toward her servant and chaperone. The ‘apish merriment’ that may once have delighted a younger Hero now constrains her. This expansion of a few words into a full four lines of verse typifies Marlowe’s treatment of Musaeus. Musaeus’s reference to Hero living alone except for her one servant, compounded with the fact that no girls of her own age or dancing youths dwell nearby (200), establishes the isolation that will be needed for Leander’s nightly swims and their secret marriage. Marlowe’s passage performs the same narrative work of preparing for Leander’s nocturnal swim and tryst, while simultaneously transforming Ovid’s sympathetic nurse into a comic image. It is a way of reading Musaeus that Marlowe draws on throughout his poem. While both poems are third-person narratives, Marlowe’s narrator is a character in his own right, revealed through his commentary as sententious, misogynistic, cynical, and voyeuristic.14 Most of the narrator’s perspective is Marlowe’s addition to Musaeus. When Hero is struck by Leander’s amorous gaze, the narrator explains that ‘Such force and vertue hath an amorous looke’ (166). Similarly, he generalizes about the forceful yet wordless response engendered by the couple’s initial touching of hands: ‘Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled’ (184). Later, in the tale of Mercury and the shepherdess, he opines that ‘All women are ambitious naturallie’ (428). Only two such moments build overtly upon statements in Musaeus. When Hero chastises him for daring to approach her in the temple, the more experienced Leander of Musaeus recognizes that such threats are actually an indication that a woman has been won over (128–132), and Musaeus subsequently suggests that a woman’s silence indicates acquiescence (165).
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